Social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit.
July 9th, 2009

Hyperlocal News Wire

Here’s a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them. This is a piece of investigation and experimentation that I’ve been able to find the time to do thanks to Will Perrin and his hyperlocal blogging initiative Talk About Local. Will also helped define the reason why it would be useful to do — for what he called “lazy journalists”.

Lazy here is used in the same way that it might be used — in praise — of a computer programmer; that is, lazy means you’ll work hard at setting yourself up right to make sure you get everything you need easily later on. Will got to the crux of the argument by saying that journalists interested in a subject — let’s say noise abatement issues — could easily find examples of those at a local level outside the areas they physically know.

So this is a run through of the decisions made in building it (and what other options could work), it’s no more than a prototype at this stage so comments and improvements are very welcome. However if you would rather just get stuck into the pipe itself, head on over.

Read the rest of this entry »

March 19th, 2009

Monitoring your “brand” on Twitter with search

If you’re doing any sort of professional work on Twitter then the main part of what you should do is listen. Listen to see what people are saying about you or your areas of expertise. You might find useful information, or you might find useful contacts or leads — or more likely you’ll be able to help people who are asking questions about you or things you aspire to be seen as expert about. In this quick guide I’ll use the term “brand” but really, “interest” area is just as valid. I’m going to assume that you’ve used Twitter (if not here’s a quick start guide), and that your “brand” has a Twitter account — if not then then the listening will all be of “interest” type but it’ll still be worthwhile, and will help you get used to how people use it to talk about services or products or subject areas.

I’ll do a “how to tweet on behalf of a brand” guide soon, as I’m doing a bit of work in that area with a couple of organisations — they’re very different in scope and what I find out there will be useful to others I hope. But first to the listening…

Twitter Search and RSS

Importantly you’ll need to (learn to) use Twitter Search and RSS, and particularly Advanced Search. We’ll use the search to build queries that show you the sort of things about your brand or subject area that you need to know.

You can refine your searches with; Words,  People (to, from or about), Places (Near this place,Within this distance), Dates, Attitudes (With positive attitude :) , With negative attitude :( , Asking a question ?), or Containing links.

When you’ve got the searches up, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of new results — it’s by far the best way, and it’s the one that will keep you sane.

First up you’ll want to monitor all @replies to you – especially if you don’t have anyone monitoring your account all day. Yes the @replies tab shows you this, but this is mainly about monitoring – not spending all day checking twitter as if it was an email inbox.

Twitter Search page

You should probably also set up a search (and subscribe to the RSS feed) of any tweets “referencing” your account name – which is mentioning you without it being the first.

After that it’s up to you, pick the combinations and searches that bring up things you’re interested in – if you’re a local business you might try tweets near you matching your work (a plumber could set up searches for “burst pipe” or “plumber” within their catchment area) if you’re a nationwide (or worldwide) organisation then you’ll have to find another way to filter down to

How you chose to respond to the tweets you find is up to you, to simply respond and say “you’ve been talking about X hire me” would be seen as spam. But again, to use the plumber example you could offer advice to help and build trust that way (eg “turn off your water, the stopcock might well be…” or “if your heating isn’t coming on, check the pilot light of your boiler”), chances are helpful tweets will be well received — good vibes for your brand might build business slowly or quickly, but  they’ll be worth it in the end. I’ll come back to this in a later article.

Make sure your profile offers enough information: website address, even phone number if you like so that anyone you’ve interacted with knows who you are and how to find out more or contact you.

All this works best with RSS,  to try to monitor everything in real time (whether in a tool like TweetDeck, or by manually refreshing the search page) would be time consuming and would eventually drive you crazy. RSS is the key to managing information, and it’ll be worth your time to try to get to grips with it.

But if you really struggle, then there is a way to get this stuff by email — TweetBeep

TweetBeep is like Google alerts for Twitter,  you can use the site to send you an email when new things match your search terms. For keywords, people or location it’s nothing Twitter’s own search facility doesn’t offer – apart from the email alerts, which can be set to come to you hourly, daily etc.

TweetBeep, for your URLs

Where TweetBeep does work well is to notify you of any tweets containing your URL – even if the web address have been shortened with services like Tiny URL (and most on Twitter have been).  Hopefully they’ll add RSS functionality soon (or someone else will build something that does) — email alerts can be filtered in your mail program and I’d recommend you do that.

And it can be as simple as that, if you go further and try to use Twitter as part of your front-line customer support then you’ll have to deal with the usual CRM issues of assigning people to each “case” and so on, but to test the water start building some searches.

February 24th, 2009

RSS as legislation

Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought reports that the US Government's new Stimulus bill requires that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS, it's not just unstructured text, but will have to be reusable data. This is a real big deal for standards of data disttibution and re-use. [link]

December 14th, 2008

Feed Me – RSS isn’t an option, it’s a must

The Birmingham Post recently published a ‘list of shame’ of local bodies that don’t make their information available by RSS. It’s pretty damning, and Birmingham City Council are one of the worst offenders — which a Brummie worries me (and is why I use them as an example here, but it’s a problem everywhere, with all types of organisations). They’re working on a new website, which you would hope would help, although their recently launched site for the ‘Big City Plan‘ has a news/events page without a feed — which indicates to me that the people ordering this stuff don’t seem to get it. It seems that organisations think that this technology is a ‘nice to have’, or an ‘extra’ – rather than the building block of the social web and the most important way to distribute your information there is.

They’re waiting for it to reach ‘mainstream’ adoption, or at least for the voices demanding it to come from the media. Which is why the Post taking a bit of a stand is important.

But I would say that RSS is almost more ‘mainstream’ than the press.

According to a Forrester report (the report is paid for, I gleaned info from it from around the web), 11% of US internet users use RSS. This might well be on the high side – but it’s the most thorough survey I can find.

back_of_an_envelopeIn 2008, 16.5 million households in the UK (65 per cent) had Internet access.

16.5/100 * 11 = 1.82

Which means that if we follow US patterns of usage (and we’re quicker, better, faster than them, right?) at least 1,815,000 people use RSS in the UK.

Average household size in the UK is around 2.31 people, so the number could be almost double.

That’s my ‘back of an envelope’ calculation (see, I actually did it on the back of an envelope), it’s not scientific but it’s the best I can get without commissioning my own surveys.

Is 1.82 million people ‘mainstream’?

I like to think of RSS as ‘quality news’, so let’s compare it to other sources of ‘quality news’ – Newsnight’s average viewing figure is around 1,000,000. And ‘quality newspapers’ average daily sale (latest ABC figures): Guardian 358,379, Independent 201,113, Times 621,831, Telegraph 835,497 – adding up to 2,016,820 (actually some 45,000 of the Telegraph’s sales are abroad, so UK sales may well be lower than this).

That would leave RSS adoption slightly less than broadsheet reading, but way above those watching the Beeb’s flagship news magazine programme.

But is quality news mainstream? Maybe not, but I bet people who watch or read aren’t dismissed as ‘geeks’.  In fact most organisations spend vast sums of money for just the chance to get their message out to these people. And it isn’t even either/or – as Joanna demonstrates using RSS is more likely to get your information out to the quality press.

So what is ‘mainstream’?

Estimates suggest that the largest participation sport in the UK is fishing, one million licences sold a year with maybe 3 times that having a rod, a line, and a mouthful of maggots at the weekend. So RSS is (very roughly) of the same order of magnitude as our most popular activities. But perhaps fishing is a bad example, it certainly doesn’t get much media coverage. Let’s try football.

1,072,402 people attended League Cup football matches last season (from Wikipedia, caveats apply) — or there were 1,072,402 tickets sold, people supporting teams that played more than one match will have gone more than once. Luckily for the ‘mainstream’ a lot of people who attended these football matches did so with their mobile phones, their cameras, laptops, their large Outside Broadcast trucks, chains of command, broadcast rights, satellites and TV networks and pushed the information out to other people.

So football is ‘mainstream’, but actually getting out of the house and watching it is less done than getting your information via a format based on XML.

But it’s more than that, people who get their news from and other medium – TV, radio, papers, paper’s websites, blogs, in my case people down the pub – are indirectly benefiting form RSS as the people that filter the news are using RSS.

I propose that we stop making excuses, RSS is more than mainstream. It’s a huge and fast growing method of news delivery – one that is almost cost-free once you’ve decided to have a website. If you are an organisation that wants your information out and read by people, you are doing yourself a disservice by not using it. If you don’t understand it, you need to hook up with someone who does.

I’m going public, I want people to supply me with RSS and I’m going to – politely – request that they do so. They’re not doing ’some geeks’ a favour, they’re doing one for themselves.

I’ve had 200 badges made with “Feed Me” on, and I’m going to wear one all the time – and help explain the ‘RSS deal’ to anyone who asks me what it is.

feedme

May 16th, 2008

New feature wishlist for Google Reader

I’ve been thinking some more about the whole, information overload, autogenerated echo, crossposting thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want RSS feeds aggregated for me on yet another web service, I don’t want every feed from every person and have to filter them out (and for duplicates). In short I want all my information in one place, custom search feeds and the like as well as people’s RSS, news as well as flickr tag feeds.

I like the Google Reader experience, I like that it’s in sync across my laptop, my phone, other computers. Google Reader could blow FriendFeed and others away if it implemented a few new features.

Here’s my new feature wishlist for Google Reader:

  • The ability to filter feeds as the come in (by location would be great, I have a lot of searches for “Birmingham” and only want the UK versions).
  • The ablitity to remove duplicate items from different feeds (and chose which “original” version remains). Two examples: blog/news results in my search feeds when I already subscribe to the originating feed. Also removing auto generated posts: twitters in friends’ Facebook statuses or “daliy links” posts in blogs when I already subscribe to the del.icio.us feed.
  • Filters to “mark as read” posts (similar to GMail). By tag would be fine — Google Reader’s search feature is brilliant (allowing you to seach within everything that’s come through), there are things I’d like to be able to search (obsure news feeds, heavy feeds like Digg content) but I don’t want to have them as outstanding posts to be read. You’d be building up your own subset of the web.
  • See other people’s notes (if shared of course) — the new notes feature is great, you could have a conversation with the notes if you could see other peoples’. A little like the “comment on anything” stuff that people are hot for on FriendFeed.
February 26th, 2008

Links for 26th February

  • FriendFeed – Not sure if this is interesting – it's a very light social network build on your existing feeds.
by Jon Bounds | Posted in del.icio.us, twitter | View Comments | Tags: , , , , ,













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